Anyone know if it's possible to flash better BIOS on one of those? A lot of basic games hang, I suspect it's because they depend on something in original PC BIOS that is not emulated well enough?
Probably possible somehow. Apparently it runs an open source BIOS[1] that they kind of stole. Despite this, the author of said BIOS added support for Book8088, so it should be possible to flash one of those images onto it[2].
I'd actually guess the mods in this article are more likely to fix broken games, though, especially if they're shipping with 8088 and CGA clones rather than the real thing. That said, I don't actually have any experience with the 5150 or its clones directly outside of emulation, so I can only really postulate. (Retro-computing has gotten quite expensive, so I have prioritized a lot of other machines for now, otherwise I'd really like to.)
The BIOS dip chip is removable and flashable. The EMM Homebrew 8088 discord and Sergey’s BIOS have been two places working semi-independently on updated BIOSes.
This is super impressive! Although I must say I used to own an XT with a V20 CPU back in the day for all intents and purposes for me all software and games I wanted to play ‘just worked’. Yes it is faster than the 8088 but that is no problem right? And sure, apparently some games are depending on 4.77Mhz apparently but I never found such a title I guess
Janitor Joe was one of the games I know of that had this issue: https://archive.org/details/msdos_Janitor_Joe_1984 when I tried to run it on a faster machine, you would run out of oxygen and lose almost immediately. Fun game at the right speed, though!
Would be interesting to see the demo changed to be able to run on the platform as well though (faster processor + no refresh) though of course racing the beam is annoying
What is the point of this laptop? You can't really do much on it except run some crappy old software from the 1980s, and a couple of newer demos from hobbyists, which you can see on youtube anyway if you want to.
I don't get this love for old PCs either. I can understand the love for an 8 bit or an Amiga, but old PCs are just dull. To be honest I didn't even like them in the 80s.
Nostalgia aside, the PC was (and continues to be) a far easier machine to clone. For an electronics hobbiest, this is a fun project. For programmers, it is a challenge to see what can be done with a platform that was rarely pushed to its full potential (hardware upgrades and compatibility were more important in the PC world).
Contrast that to the Amiga. The custom chipset makes it harder for the electronics hobbiest (unless they're using original hardware) and I get the impression that the demoscene has uncovered most of the potential for software development.
I think people get into retrocomputing for different reasons. Certainly the allure of nostalgia and revisiting childhood memories and experiences is enough to explain why someone would want to re-experience the IBM-compatible PC, even if it wasn't as glorious or novel as an Amiga. But more than being about a specific machine, I think the drive for retrocomputing is as much about the old computers as it is about the new ones.
Because, for all of the many faults and flaws of IBM or old Microsoft, there's something I think most people can agree on: while it may not be completely dead and gone, the magic of computing has suffered immensely in recent years. All of the bullshit associated with modern always-on computers that can't be repaired, are difficult to program, and yet swamped with security issues and ridiculous glitches and bugs and advertising and tracking and etc. has been killing the magic of computing and programming. Almost everything about computers feels like it's designed to sell you something. It happened pretty gradually, too, so it's easy to have not noticed. Just about as soon as computers had always-on internet connections, software had begun checking for updates and begging you to register them, or worse, requiring online activation to even use them. It was all bound to happen.
So when you boot up an old machine, even just some random unremarkable Wintel OEM machine, it may seem pointless. Who cares? Even the nostalgic or at least alluring aesthetic elements (the somewhat annoying yet soothing whir of old HDDs, the knocking of the floppy disk drive seek test, the piezoelectric beep as the machine passes POST, the bang and click of a CRT monitor turning on) are something that you could just wear a good pair of headphones for and listen to on YouTube if you wanted. Does anyone actually want to use, say, an old crappy version of Windows today?
Yep. Now, I grew up with Windows ME and later XP (and well, later, Linux; no Windows on my computers these days), because I'm still relatively a youth. So, if I go too far back, it gets too primitive for me to really appreciate. I feel the same way about video games; I can still somewhat enjoy old NES games, because I played a lot of that when I was younger, but Atari VCS/2600 games are before me and feel just a tad too primitive to enjoy for very long. But if I boot say, Windows NT 4 or 2000 or something, and get a decent development environment going for some oldschool Win32 C++, it feels very enjoyable. The latency is VERY noticeably lower for both the mouse cursor and typing, which is just, very pleasing. The operating system stays very out of the way: no pop-ups about Windows Defender having scanned my device, no slowdowns, no weird network fetches, it's just me and the text editor. The compiler produces worse executables and is buggier, but it's really fast and the integrated debugging works very well. Old C++ and Win32 sucks to code in... but now with my more modern programming knowledge, I have a better feel for how to do it "well", even with worse tools. I have the programming discipline of someone who has experienced modern tooling and proven patterns for writing better code, so I can go back and do things "right". And I can do them just for me. I don't even bother posting the code, I just spend an afternoon writing a small program or something just for fun.
I'm not arguing there was nothing crappy about Windows in the 90s, either, for what it's worth. OEMs loaded computers with tons of crapware that made them slow, and as early as 2001 were begging you to register online at first boot and other dumb things. Microsoft themselves engaged in a fair bit of anti-competitive behavior that would become infamous soon after. But now that it's firmly in the past, it's easier to see it as a historical artifact rather than an ongoing threat; more of a reminder than an annoyance. I don't know if we'll feel the same way about today's variant o...
it's the power of dreams. if you dreamed about something like this in the 80s, that dream is still there and now you can accomplish it. for instance in the 80s I dreamed about owning a portable computer and never thought I'll own one one day... now I own a dozen that are way beyond that dream, but not quite as close as the book 8088
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[ 3.5 ms ] story [ 95.4 ms ] threadI'd actually guess the mods in this article are more likely to fix broken games, though, especially if they're shipping with 8088 and CGA clones rather than the real thing. That said, I don't actually have any experience with the 5150 or its clones directly outside of emulation, so I can only really postulate. (Retro-computing has gotten quite expensive, so I have prioritized a lot of other machines for now, otherwise I'd really like to.)
[1]: https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/chinese-8088-based...
[2]: https://github.com/skiselev/8088_bios
Never had a compatibility problem but if I had I would’ve just needed to hit the ol’ Turbi button to bring it down to 4.77 MHz.
Would be interesting to see the demo changed to be able to run on the platform as well though (faster processor + no refresh) though of course racing the beam is annoying
Contrast that to the Amiga. The custom chipset makes it harder for the electronics hobbiest (unless they're using original hardware) and I get the impression that the demoscene has uncovered most of the potential for software development.
Because, for all of the many faults and flaws of IBM or old Microsoft, there's something I think most people can agree on: while it may not be completely dead and gone, the magic of computing has suffered immensely in recent years. All of the bullshit associated with modern always-on computers that can't be repaired, are difficult to program, and yet swamped with security issues and ridiculous glitches and bugs and advertising and tracking and etc. has been killing the magic of computing and programming. Almost everything about computers feels like it's designed to sell you something. It happened pretty gradually, too, so it's easy to have not noticed. Just about as soon as computers had always-on internet connections, software had begun checking for updates and begging you to register them, or worse, requiring online activation to even use them. It was all bound to happen.
So when you boot up an old machine, even just some random unremarkable Wintel OEM machine, it may seem pointless. Who cares? Even the nostalgic or at least alluring aesthetic elements (the somewhat annoying yet soothing whir of old HDDs, the knocking of the floppy disk drive seek test, the piezoelectric beep as the machine passes POST, the bang and click of a CRT monitor turning on) are something that you could just wear a good pair of headphones for and listen to on YouTube if you wanted. Does anyone actually want to use, say, an old crappy version of Windows today?
Yep. Now, I grew up with Windows ME and later XP (and well, later, Linux; no Windows on my computers these days), because I'm still relatively a youth. So, if I go too far back, it gets too primitive for me to really appreciate. I feel the same way about video games; I can still somewhat enjoy old NES games, because I played a lot of that when I was younger, but Atari VCS/2600 games are before me and feel just a tad too primitive to enjoy for very long. But if I boot say, Windows NT 4 or 2000 or something, and get a decent development environment going for some oldschool Win32 C++, it feels very enjoyable. The latency is VERY noticeably lower for both the mouse cursor and typing, which is just, very pleasing. The operating system stays very out of the way: no pop-ups about Windows Defender having scanned my device, no slowdowns, no weird network fetches, it's just me and the text editor. The compiler produces worse executables and is buggier, but it's really fast and the integrated debugging works very well. Old C++ and Win32 sucks to code in... but now with my more modern programming knowledge, I have a better feel for how to do it "well", even with worse tools. I have the programming discipline of someone who has experienced modern tooling and proven patterns for writing better code, so I can go back and do things "right". And I can do them just for me. I don't even bother posting the code, I just spend an afternoon writing a small program or something just for fun.
I'm not arguing there was nothing crappy about Windows in the 90s, either, for what it's worth. OEMs loaded computers with tons of crapware that made them slow, and as early as 2001 were begging you to register online at first boot and other dumb things. Microsoft themselves engaged in a fair bit of anti-competitive behavior that would become infamous soon after. But now that it's firmly in the past, it's easier to see it as a historical artifact rather than an ongoing threat; more of a reminder than an annoyance. I don't know if we'll feel the same way about today's variant o...
Entertainment is certainly one of the reasons.
Looks like a cracked LCD to me :)